Slipped Disk

I’ve often seen pictures of old men, their backs bent, leaning forward with one hand on a hip, what you’d call stooped. I always thought it was just because that was how their bones became deformed.

Not. It’s because their in great pain, and this is the most comfortable standing position. Like them, I find myself comfortable only standing and leaning forward and down. The problem is a ruptured disk. “Slipped disk” in the familiar parlance, though disks are fixed in position, and cannot ‘slip’. Instead, it’s a hernia, a protuberance of the disk that pinches the sciatic nerve.

Painful? YOU BET painful! The sciatic nerve become pinched, causing pain to the whole hip, as well as the rest of the leg; “like there’s a hot poker in your leg,” Avis described it, and that’s a pretty good way to put it. If I stand up for any length of time, upright that is, the pain gets greater and greater, until I just want to scream.

If I’ve been walking for a while — say, 10 minutes — the pain is so excruciating I want to cry; it is a pain as great as passing a stone–which itself is said to be the closest a male can get to the experience of pain in childbirth.